The present disclosure relates to touch optimized hierarchal tables and pivot tables.
Presently, navigating large tables (and even small tables to a certain degree) and pivot tables on touch screen devices (i.e., phone, tablet computing device, etc.) is tedious, in part, because of the small form factor and requirements for large row/cell size to enable touch based interactions. This situation typically has been dealt with by creating larger versions of standard tables. Furthermore, mechanisms exist that enable selection in tables with small text (e.g., microstrategy), which allows for denser data display, but nonetheless does nothing to improve navigation.
Furthermore, traditional tables/pivot tables require users to scroll through a significant amount of data to arrive at the data of interest. For example, suppose a table includes Sales Reps organized by state, with 10 Sales Reps per state. To get to sales reps for Wyoming, a user would have to scroll through 490 rows with a traditional table.
Turning now to FIG. 1A, a table 105 being partially displayed on a touch screen device 110, is illustrated. In table 105 all of the levels of the hierarchy are fully expanded and so scrolling through the table to find specific data is extremely difficult. Furthermore, since the table headers are not persistent in all views, it becomes easy for a user to become lost or disoriented within the table. As such, if each level includes 1000 lines, and 10 lines are displayed on touch screen device 110 at a time, then about 100 scrolls would be needed to reach the end of table 105.
Referring to FIG. 1B, a view of touch screen device 110 with fixed headers 115 and 120 and scroll bars 125 and 130 is illustrated. This improves the view in FIG. 1A, but still has a number of shortcomings. With the fixed headers 115 and 120, the display area is significantly limited and much of the data in the table is unable to be displayed. Further, using scroll bars 125 and 130, there is a significant amount of scrolling and panning required to navigate through the table. Furthermore, an additional problem exists in such tables without scroll bars in that the table is scrolled as a whole, rather than by layers, so that an extremely high amount of scrolling is necessary to navigate an entire hierarchical table. Hence, improvements in the art are needed.